Pressure from investors led by Elliott Management have the IT industry looking at multiple ways EMC could more quickly build shareholder value. Ideas range from doing nothing to radical business changes.

Dell, which is also OEMing technology from Nutanix, plans to add an option to its Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO: RAIL hyper-converged appliance that adds software-defined storage capabilities from Nexenta.

HP becomes the latest vendor to join the hyper-converged infrastructure market with two new appliances, one based on its own software-defined storage stack and the other on VMware's upcoming EVO: RAIL software stack.

Veeam, which has a history of working exclusively with channel partners and offering free versions of new products, is making sure its new Veeam EndPoint Backup Free solution does not get in the way of its channel business.

HP is promoting new object storage solutions tying its ProLiant servers to software from Cleversafe and Scality, a move that comes as channel partners report scaling and other issues with HP's Ibrix-based StoreAll solutions.

Gridstore, which develops scale-out storage solutions based on its high-performance storage nodes, has added compute capability to those nodes to take on Nutanix and SimpliVity in the fast-growing hyper-converged infrastructure market.